Symposium: "Authoring in the Digital Age"

David Desrimais: "Archiving in Style, Part 2"

“A prospective analysis of Jean Boîte Éditions.
What are the upcoming challenges for a publishing house that deals with digital issues? Based on the recent history of the Press, we’ll go browse few case studies (notably some detailed stories about two books: Google, "Volume 1" by King Zog and "Theory" by Kenneth Goldsmith), our expectations about AI and uncreativeness... Aiming to one expectation: what’s next in our need to produce artifacts that are bridges from screen to bookshelves.”

David Desrimais is a publisher based in Paris, France.
Founder and director of Jean Boîte Éditions (with Mathieu Cénac, since 2011), he publishes books in the digital age, in the fields of arts, humanities and poetics. Conceived hand-in-hand with worldwide artists and authors, all the books are shaped for International distribution (now in 15 countries). In the academic field, David Desrimais works as Associate Professor (PAST) and co-director of the Création Éditoriale (Creative Publishing) Master's degree at the University of Clermont-Ferrand, France – where he is also Associate Researcher at the CELIS laboratory (Centre d’étude de la littérature et de la sociopoétique). Former Head of Digital Projects for the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain (2007-2017), David Desrimais regularly works as an expert and director of digital projects for cultural and scientific institutions, as well as for private clients (Mobilier national, IDDRI-Sciences Po, Mairie de Paris, Google Arts & Culture...).

Craig Dworkin: "Poetry in the Age of User-Generated Content"

“With a database aesthetic and a frequent turn to online source material, the texts of first-phase Conceptual Writing aligned with the early internet in fraught ways. This literature was newly relevant because of how it read against the contemporaneous emergence of database-driven cultures of surveillance, finance and communication. Some two decades later, certain works are again newly relevant because of the ways they exploit both the themes and forms at the heart of the social-media networks that now predominate and structure online culture. Although at a glance these current works may look very much like the Conceptual Writing of the late 20th Century, they signify with heightened urgency on account of those cultural congruencies. This talk proposes that we might note four key areas in which technological, economic and literary trends now overlap: passive indexing, affect, junkspace and platform. By way of test cases, it will look at some of the most innovative contemporary writing by young American poets in order to argue for the ways in which the rise of social media has altered the significance of appropriative, procedural, and conceptual writing practices over the course of the 21st Century.”

Craig Dworkin is the author of two scholarly monographs, Reading the Illegible (Northwestern UP, 2003) and No Medium (MIT, 2013), and the editor of several collections: Architectures of Poetry, with María Eugenia Díaz Sánchez (Rodopi, 2004); Language to Cover a Page: The Early Writing of Vito Acconci (MIT, 2006); The Consequence of Innovation: 21st-Century Poetics (Roof, 2008); The Sound of Poetry/ The Poetry of Sound, with Marjorie Perloff (Chicago, 2009); Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing, with Kenneth Goldsmith (Northwestern, 2011); and Nothing: A User's Manual (Information As Material, 2016). He has also published over a half-dozen books of poetry, including Dure (Cuneiform, 2004), Strand (Roof, 2005), Parse (Atelos, 2008), The Perverse Library (Information As Material, 2010), Motes (Roof, 2011), Chapter XXIV (Red Butte Press, 2013),12 Erroneous Displacements and a Fact (Information As Material, 2016), and DEF (Information As Material, 2017). Craig teaches literature and theory at the University of Utah and serves as Founding Senior Editor to eclipsearchive.org.

Dina Kelberman: "Artist Talk"

“Much of my work comes out of my natural tendency to spend long hours collecting and organizing imagery from the internet, television and other commonplace surroundings of my everyday life. I like to elevate the familiar and transform brief moments into infinite stretches of time. I gravitate towards things that are simple, colorful, industrial and mundane. I am interested in using materials that are easily accessible and familiar to the everyday person – anyone can and should make things that are perfectly natural to them and yet totally inexplicable to someone else. Humans are definitely a failure of an animal, but at least every single one of them is extremely weird. In some ways my work is about how everyone and everything is special, and so while specialness is not special, it is still pretty much the most exciting thing going. I enjoy exercising resourcefulness; setting up limitations and then seeing what is possible within them. I like how when things are simple enough they turn into whatever you were already thinking about, but they don’t lose themselves, it just turns out they were always about that thing. Sometimes I think intentionality is the opposite of truth but then again that’s art. I make work as I am compelled to make it and consider why later, often resulting in connections I didn’t consciously set out to realize. In close examination of the simple or the seemingly insignificant the viewer may bring their own limitless associations.”

Dina Kelberman is an artist living and working in Baltimore, MD. Kelberman has been invited to create original web-based pieces for the New Museum and The Marina Abramovic Institute and has shown internationally including at Le Mois de la Photo in Montreal, Canada, the Internationale Design Saint-Etinne and Recontres de la Photographie in France, and The Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival and Shenzhen Independent Animation Biennale in China. Her work has been written about in The New York Times, Art21 and NPR, and most recently in the books Known and Strange Things (Cole, 2016) and Wasting Time on the Internet (Goldsmith, 2016).

Tom McCarthy: "Reading from "Satin Island""

“The author will read excerpts from his book "Satin Island" and a discussion will follow with Kenneth Goldsmith.”

Tom McCarthy (Stirling, 1969) is a novelist whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages. His first novel, "Remainder", won the 2008 Believer Book Award and was recently adapted for the cinema. His third, "C", was a 2010 Booker Prize finalist, as was his fourth, "Satin Island", in 2015. McCarthy is also author of the study "Tintin and the Secret of Literature", and of the essay collection "Typewriters", "Bombs", "Jellyfish". He contributes regularly to publications such as The New York Times, The London Review of Books, Harper’s and Artforum. In 2013 he was awarded the inaugural Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction by Yale University.

Emily Segal: "Mercury Retrograde"

“Emily Segal is an artist, writer, and trend forecaster. She founded the art collective and trend forecasting group K-HOLE, and is currently the director of Nemesis, a think tank for cultural strategy based in Berlin, Helsinki and NYC. She will be reading an excerpt from her novel-in-progress, "Mercury Retrograde", which explores virality, fame and affect in the pre-Trump New York media startup landscape. A Q&A with Kenneth Goldsmith will follow.”

Emily Segal (b. 1988, New York, NY) is an artist, writer, and strategist. Currently, she is the co-founder of Nemesis Global, a think tank for cultural research based in Berlin, Helsinki and NYC. Previous to Nemesis, she was a founder of the collective and trend forecasting group K- HOLE (2011 - 2016). K-HOLE's free PDF trend reports on the nature of millennial change were downloaded half a million times, and have sparked countless news stories worldwide. Their term "normcore" was shortlisted for the Oxford English Dictionary's Word of the Year in 2014. K-HOLE's work has been presented at galleries and museums internationally, including the Serpentine Gallery and MoMA PS1. As a strategist, Emily has worked on projects for Comme des Garcons, Prada, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Uniqlo, Target, Beats, and many others. From 2014 - 2015, she was the Creative Director of the online platform Genius. She was named one of Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in Business and served as a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Future of the Consumer Industries. Emily’s essays and interviews have appeared in publications including Texte zur Kunst, Die Welt, e-flux journal, 032c, and Flash Art International, where she was the magazine’s Editor-at-Large from 2015-2017. Emily holds a B.A. in Comparative Literature from Brown University. Previously having taught at Columbia GSAPP and as a visiting critic at the Yale School of Art, she is currently a visiting Professor of Design at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie.